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Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"
That, if all the medical training that daddy received was a few minutes on Google, and things didn't go badly, the real headline ought to be: "Mother ejects baby in uncomplicated delivery"
The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea; but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.
For years I told people, "the information revolution has not yet begun." About six months ago, while eating breakfast at a little, podunk diner in a town of around 500 people, I got curious about what causes Tidal Locking. So, without thinking about it, I whipped out my iPhone and looked it up using Wikipanion.
Then, I realized what I was doing. I, as someone who knows basically nothing about orbital mechanics, was sitting in a little diner on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and had access to more information than I could possibly use on an obscure, orbital-mechanical phenomenon. All on a whim. That's when I decided that "the information revolution has begun." It's not well-begun, it's not finished, it's not even fully taken shape yet. But it's begun.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Which is particularly annoying because deletionists will be happy to tell you that Wikipedia Is Not A Manual Or Guidebook, so this could never have happened with Wikipedia in the first place.
What's so life-and-death (read: dangerous) about giving birth? My pet hamster can do it all by itself, and it's probably the dumbest creature on the planet.
That we have to google how to have a baby. Your deity must be proud! Or Darwin. Here I was thinking we're the smartest we've ever been... and we need instructions on how to reproduce. Never mind that 2000 years ago, even 200 years ago, most everyone was illiterate. And 20,000 years ago, they probably didn't even realize babies come from sex. (Actually many tribes consider the baby in proportion to the number of contributing men). What ever would we do?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The survival rates for childbirth without medical support are lousy enough to make medical support a generally good idea
According to the article, the "google-delivered" baby-girl was the mother's fourth pregnancy and fourth birth.
That means that all previous 3 of them went ok, and that the mother has quite some experience.
Also, as the whole story happened in a country were medical assistance is available and as the parents seem not to be against assistance (the mother seem to be checked by a midwife on a regular basis. they even called the midwife back - she just didn't manage to arrive soon enough), we can presume that they had pre-natal assistance (Echography, etc.) and we can assume that the doctors and mid-wife saw nothing peculiar or dangerous in advance either.
If there's no peculiar bad luck (like the unlucky baby entangling herself in the umbilical cord while exiting), chances are high that everything will go ok this time too. The father needed only to assist the mother, not to be able to react and start an emergency resucitation or whatever.
So although a medical support would have helped in case of some catastrophic event, the chance of such a catastrophic event where pretty low in this peculiar couple's situation.
but it isn't as though humans are exempt from the general mammalian ability to deliver live young without dying.
Well, on the other hand humans have a couple of problem. Unlike carnivore mammalian, our women tend to give birth to a rather single huge fair-developed baby instead of several small partially developed kittens/puppies. This size-problem is further worsened by the fact we are the only bipedal, upright-walking mammals and thus have pelvises which are optimized for a different bio-mechanical everyday use as the other mammals.
So quite a lot of thing can go wrong. Slightly more than with cats and dogs, for example.
On the other hand, we're social animals and have probably lived in small packs and tribes for quite a long period. Chances are high that, even with our cavemen ancestors young first-time mother could receive help from more experienced members of the tribe. (Supposedly, prostitution isn't the only job which could be called "the world's oldest profession")
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Um, I have three children, and each time, the only thing I thought about the delivery beforehand was, "Gee, I sure am glad a doctor will be handling this."
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Except the point the GP was making is that the content wouldn't be in Wikipedia in the first place, so it's accuracy is hardly relevant.
It's reliable enough and credible enough for the average netizen. Sure, you won't get browny points citing it in academia, but when I want to know something about something, I check Wikipedia first.
Mom gives birth to baby, dad gets credit for the hard work.